Seb Duggan

As seems to be required now, here is my contribution to Steve Bryant’s How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day:

Having graduated from university in 1996 with a degree in Classics and – slightly more usefully – a reasonably popular Clint Eastwood fan site (”The Page With No Name”; I had a lot of spare time at uni…), I found myself an entry-level web monkey job at Future Publishing.

I started purely building the HTML pages; all the heavy lifting was done by a few techie guys, using Active Server Pages in VBScript (long before ASP .NET, so in what would now be called ASP Classic). We used various Microsoft technologies – anyone out there remember IE channels? (I think we may have been a launch partner for them…) Over the next few years I picked up bit of ASP here and there, and before long I was a techie guy myself.

This morning, I couldn’t reach my web server. Dead. Nothing.

I contacted my server company, who very quickly diagnosed that the server had blue-screened; they rebooted it and all is now well. Looking at my web logs, I think it was down for about an hour – not disastrous, but definitely inconvenient and not A Good Thing. (Note to self: set up a monitoring service so I know when it’s down!)

So I started looking at the system logs to see if I could find what caused it to crash. And there was a big clue, right in front of me.

This is something I’ve been meaning to look at ever since a conversation I had at Scotch on the Rocks 2011. Many of us – even if we use the latest and greatest in source control – still use FTP to deploy our site changes to production. This causes several headaches, among them remembering which files have changed, and getting all those files deployed simultaneously.

After looking around the web, I have found several resources that helped me set up Git to deploy my site.

I’ve recently taken to using the excellent Postmark to send out all the transactional emails from my web sites. For just 0.15 cents per email, you get the benefits of increased deliverability and a great API to track and manage any undelivered mail.

If you like, you can send your emails simply by using Postmark’s SMTP servers – a really quick way to migrate to their system. But the real power comes when you start using their API. I’m not going to go into detail about how to set this up here, but in short you just have to send your message as a JSON object via HTTP Post.

And this is where threads come in. There are some web services you will use – for instance, payment gateways – where the returned result is critical to the continuation of the page request. But others – as well as Postmark, I also send API requests to MailChimp for mailing list subscriptions – where you really don’t need to know the outcome.

A cautionary tale for anyone running their own web server – something I’d never considered previously.

We’ve all been there – you’re setting up your web server, and request a bunch of IP addresses from your hosting provider. You then assign these IPs to your various web sites, and off you go…

But how many of you actually check the history of these IP addresses?

If you need to protect your FW/1-based site against SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks – and you do! – you can do a lot worse than use John Mason’s Portcullis. It’s a single CFC which scans and sanitises your Form, URL and Cookie scopes, and optionally sets up a blacklist of repeatedly-offending IP addresses.

A quick tip for when you’re designing a site with centered content.

If the content doesn’t reach to the bottom of the window, there’s no vertical scroll bar; if you then navigate to a longer page, you’ll see the content jump about 10px to the left as it’s centered in a slightly narrower window. Sometimes, you’ll even see this jump half-way through rendering a longer page.

UPDATE: I’ve modified the code slightly, as the syntax was slightly off. It worked, but wouldn’t override any settings already set by Mura’s config file.

As of version 5.3, Mura CMS uses CKEditor 3 as its HTML WYSIWYG editor. Blue River have done a great job of integrating the editor, but there are a few extra customisations you might like to make.